


Hooked

by MoragMacPherson



Category: Novakcest
Genre: M/M, Marking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-15
Updated: 2012-02-15
Packaged: 2017-10-31 05:59:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/340701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoragMacPherson/pseuds/MoragMacPherson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prompt from the <a href="http://moragmacpherson.dreamwidth.org/85726.html">Self-Cest Comment Fic Meme</a>: "Every scar the twins get makes them a little less symmetrical. Guess they'll just have to put matching marks on each other."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hooked

It starts with a fish hook.  The scar it leaves behind looks much the same: a fine curled line through Jimmy's eyebrow. It's only remarkable as a flaw on Jimmy's ten year old face because it's absent on Jacob's; Jacob having been the one who hasn't quite mastered the art of casting without almost poking his brother's eye out. Sally simply rolls her eyes and tells her sons to be more careful from now on; it wasn't like she could ever convince them _not_ to do anything. Besides, the tiny curl comes in handy and it becomes much easier for everyone else in Pontiac to tell the twins apart.  
  
It's the first scar, the first visible scar that marks them apart, but it's hardly the last. But after Jacob leaves for MIT, the scars that really count between the twins are the ones no one else can see. It doesn't matter that Jacob's left pinky is just a little crooked from the time it got smashed in Amelia's door on the way back from prom, or that there's another fine line along Jimmy's temple, courtesy of a random shard of obsidian in the old rock quarry where they used to go swimming. Those are merely surface differences. Who needs to check those, when you can just look at Jimmy's eyes and see the hint of resentment; when you catch Jacob anytime he thinks no one is looking and he reaches for the brother's hand that's no longer there to grasp?  
  
Jimmy certainly doesn't care about where the smooth patch of skin on the inside of Jacob's left arm came from (a minor junior-year lab fire Jacob extinguished himself a few moments later). Jimmy does notice how sensitive the scar is as he runs his thumb up and along it. Jacob shivers, or maybe he shivers because Jimmy's pulled his shirt over his head and it's a little chill in this office. Jimmy takes a scant moment and he catalogues every visible difference between them in one check; they're negligible. Jacob didn't lose a wife, a daughter; Jacob isn't trying to fill that gaping hole of loss with the blasphemous taboo of more than brotherly love.  
  
But it is Jacob who starts the biting; Jimmy kisses his brother tenderly, as Amelia had taught him to. Jacob kisses Jimmy with demand and intent; he leaves bruising marks on Jimmy's upper arms. There are more than a few secrets left between them; maybe there are holes in Jacob's heart to rival the ones in Jimmy's; maybe, just maybe, Jacob needs this as much as Jimmy.  
  
Jacob opens himself up to Jimmy, offers himself up to him, and in any sacrifice, there must be some ceremonial blood letting. But Jimmy's not a cruel man. He preps Jacob, stretches him, pushes into him with all the tender patience of a long-time liaison. It's only towards the end, with Jacob spilling his release on the cold tiled floor a minute or so before Jimmy spills his own claim deep inside his brother, that Jimmy takes the final cut.   
  
Jacob will brush it aside as something done in the heat of passion, but Jimmy knows better. When Jimmy digs his teeth into the back of Jacob's neck, letting the incisor dig in, break the skin, slide and pull down, Jimmy knows exactly what he's done. When it heals, the scar will be ragged, never quite as fine as the one through his own eyebrow. But the mark, the dragged fish-hook of imperfect flesh on the back of Jacob's neck. That little alteration will mark them as twins even better than the identical genes they share. What do genes matter in the face of pain inflicted, suffered, and shared together over the course of lives that always try but never quite manage to separate?  
  
Jimmy falls off of his brother, a sweating wreck, and wipes Jacob's back with his own shirt. Jacob's already collapsed to the ground, fucked out and eyelids fluttering over dilated pupils that declare his bliss louder than any megaphone. If he notices the thin trail of blood Jimmy wipes away along with the sweat, Jacob shows no sign. But later he'll know.  
  
They both will.


End file.
